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BY ZACH MORTICE / PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAHAR COSTON-HARDY

New Yorkers avoid Times Square, and Chicagoans stay away from Navy Pier. It’s an ironclad rule. The public spaces that are most popular are there to attract tourists. Locals don’t go there.

In Chicago, going to Navy Pier had been something like a grudging civic responsibility you accept when you have out-of-town guests. It’s always been the most meta of Chicago’s architectural landmarks—essentially a large viewing platform, at more than half a mile long, for the city’s epic skyline, the finest way to see it all without a boat. But best to keep your eyes on the horizon, and not look at the motley collection of cotton candy vendors and garish signs that crowded the waterfront.

But today Navy Pier is looking and acting more like an authentic part of the city, for locals and tourists alike. A renovation by James Corner Field Operations has turned it from a tourist mall to a (more…)

BY JULIAN RAXWORTHY

In my seminar on contemporary theories of landscape architecture at the University of Cape Town, I recently asked students, during the week allocated to discussing landscape urbanism, to choose a project from Africa that could be called “landscape urbanist.” One student chose the renovation of the Luanda waterfront in Angola. This project is an upgrade that could just as easily be described as conventional landscape architecture or urban design practice. That landscape urbanism seemed to just be landscape architecture to my students suggests how generic the term has become when considered in relation to implementation: It could be just about anything. Landscape urbanism is a vibe.

Landscape urbanism is an evocative term that has exercised great influence over academic design discourse in landscape architecture but has remained ambiguous in practical terms. One of its key propagandists, Charles Waldheim, Honorary ASLA, a professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, has attempted to provide a “general theory” for it in his new book Landscape as Urbanism, which, while engagingly going some of the way toward doing so, leaves the persistent question of “OK, but so what?” remaining.

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY PIERRE BÉLANGER, ASLA

Hanging vertically on the basement wall of Room L30C in Gund Hall at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is a seemingly anonymous light box. It’s rarely looked at or recognized and has been that way for more than 10 years. It’s considered a work of art—a sculpture, according to the Harvard University Cultural Properties Database—and it’s the primary source of light for the small underground office of Trevor O’Brien, the assistant manager of building services at the school. “No one has really bothered to ask about it over the years,” O’Brien says. It’s nearly invisible, but behind its anonymity, not to mention its remarkable beauty, lies an interesting backstory.

The rectangular light box was made by James Corner, ASLA, for the 2001 conference, “Territories: Contemporary European Landscape Design,” organized by George Hargreaves, FASLA, and Dorothée Imbert, ASLA, here at the school. The light box is a design project ahead of its time. The aluminum box, 36 inches by 48 inches and 4 inches deep, is part of a proposal for the growth and expansion of Stockholm into the neighboring suburb of Älvsjö. Layered among the collage of transparencies and films of information is a caption that reads somewhat like a micromanifesto:

February’s issue of LAM minces no words, starting with Fred A. Bernstein, who talks with female landscape architects whose firms listed as women business enterprises, or WBE’s, can sometimes attract jobs that make them feel as if they’re on board only to fill a quota; Jerry van Eyck, ASLA, a Dutch landscape architect who transplanted himself to New York, is making his mark in North America with !melk, his firm of four years that has public space and park business projects as lively as his character; and the Pérez Art Museum Miami’s grand new building by Herzog & de Meuron and ethereal hanging gardens by Patrick Blanc become backdrops to the small yet thoughtful designs of ArquitectonicaGEO, which repurpose the neglected Miami waterfront with native plantings and innovative flood control.

In Now, Camden, New Jersey, proves that park renovations don’t always have to be expensive. In Water, Anne Raver follows up our earlier coverage of Owens Lake in California, where an official decision has now been reached on how to tamp down the toxic dust blowing off the dried lake bed. Planning takes a look at the wave of the future in ecodistricts; House Call visits a picturesque vineyard by Scott Lewis Landscape Architecture, which won a 2014 ASLA Honor Award in Residential Design; and in The Back, the long forgotten Älvsjö Flatbed, produced by James Corner a generation ago, reveals a design language ahead of its time. All this plus our regular Species,Goods, and Books columns. The full table of contents for February can be found here.